Intel shows off Mitosis speculative threading technology

At the IDF a new project called Mitosis was displayed to the public. This is a hardware and compiler solution to implement speculative threading.

On modern day Out of Order microprocessors, the CPUs themselves will speculatively execute code based on what it thinks will need to be executed in the future - thus improving processor utilization and overall performance. This research project proposes that the same sort of speculative execution be applied on a thread level, meaning that threads are created on the fly and speculatively executed by idle cores in a system in order to improve performance on future multi-core CPUs.

Learn more about speculative threading at AnandTech. Intel says this technique may mean a 2x to 3x performance boost. However, it may still take five to ten years before this technology will be finished for production.